The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford

Innovation | Entrepreneurship | Leadership

Oleksandr Akymenko

Oleksandr Akymenko is an entrepreneur, co-founder of platfor.media, a company focused on serving the Ukrainian progressive and creative community, supporting their dreams, hopes and projects.

During his fellowship, Akymenko learned the basics of management and entrepreneurship — including negotiations, finance, impact investing, advertising, monetization, platform development, venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystems. He believes economists, technologists and journalists need to work together much more closely to understand and create the future of media. Akymenko has taken classes at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford Law School, School of Engineering, the Political Science department and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).

He has participated in numerous conferences, mainly focused on media development trends, including ONA15, TEDxStanford`16, FastCompany FC/LA`16, Future of Media and 125 years of Journalism at Stanford.

Journalism Challenge

Create, experiment and show an example of success for others to follow.

About Oleksandr

Oleksandr Akymenko is a Ukrainian entrepreneur and journalist with experience in online, television and magazine reporting. He is a co-founder of platfor.ma, a media website aimed at the Creative Class. In 2014, Akymenko participated in YanukovychLeaks, a collaborative effort by journalists to salvage and publish the archives of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukoyvch that had been dumped in a river. He wrote several investigative stories based on that information and spoke at conferences in Ukraine and abroad. Akymenko had previously created and led the investigative department of Forbes Ukraine, where his reporting included an investigation of a young oligarch, Sergey Kurchenko. When Kurchenko bought the magazine’s parent company in mid-2013, Akymenko and several other staff members resigned in protest. Before joining Forbes, Akymenko had helped found Svidomo, which produces investigative projects and worked at an investigative program on one of Ukraine’s largest television channels.

The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford foster journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. Each year, we give up to twenty outstanding individuals from around the world the resources to pursue and test their ideas for improving the quality of news and information reaching the public.